Amazon Kindle, E-Books Outsold Traditional Books This Holiday

No Christmas miracles here: Amazon.com announced that its much-publicized Kindle e-book reader was its most gifted item this holiday season, and said that on Dec. 25, it sold more e-books than physical books.

Amazon.com expressed its thanks to its customers on Dec. 26, saying
that they'd made its Kindle e-reader the most gifted item in the online
retailers' history.

Additionally, Amazon announced that on Christmas Day, for the first
time ever, customers purchased more e-books than physical books.

"We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted
item ever in our history," said Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, in a
statement. "On behalf of Amazon.com employees around the world, we wish
everyone happy holidays and happy reading!"

Amazon did offer, however, that on its best day ever, customers
worldwide ordered 9.5 million items - or 110 items per second. It
shipped to 178 countries, and on its peak day during the holiday
season, it shipped more than 7 million items.

Amazon offers more than 390,000 Kindle books, and among its sellers
this holiday season were Dan Brown's "Lost Symbol," Tom Pawlik's
"Vanish" and "Snowbound" by Janice Kay Johnson.

Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.